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Quotes II

These are delicious quotes and other cool things I’ve seen read or heard in the last few days:

“Standing in a litter of chips, he is fitting two of the boards together. Between the shadow spaces they are yellow as gold, like soft gold, bearing on their flanks in smooth undulations the marks of the adze blade: a good carpenter, Cash is. He holds the two planks on the trestle, fitted along the edges in a quarter of the finished box. He kneels and squints along the edge of them, then he lowers them and takes up the adze. A good carpenter. Addie Bundren could not want a better one, a better box to lie in.” (pg 4) – William Faulkner captures a coffin-maker at work, from As I lay Dying (1930)

“Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and connect, steam escaping puffs, a vibration in the carriage’s frame, a poising, an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second sheep, all out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about among the rest of the things to be carried out to salvation.” (pg 1) – Thomas Pynchon on the uncanny nature of a rail car, from Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

” ‘I desperately loved and tried to ‘get’ you for a long time, but afterwards, maybe with the exhaustion of the effort, the love itself became exhausted,’ Martha wrote.” (pg 25) Erik Larsson revealing Martha Dodd’s epistolary confessions of falling out of love with her husband, from In the Garden of Beasts (2011)

“My big issue, for a while, was my temper. I have a bit of one, not vicious or anything, but just enough that I can blow my top when pushed enough. And when you have kids you’re always getting pushed. I’ve worked at it though, I really try and remember that they’re little and having their old man blow up at them is so counterproductive in almost every way… Calm, cool, trying to always remember that I’m setting an example for them and also that to a little person a big person going mental is probably a bit terrifying… Now I’m not one of those people who treats their kids like little adults because that’s stupid[, in my opinion]. They’re kids. They are literally mentally deficient and if you don’t believe me you should hear my almost four year old, super bright and all that, talk to her feet.” (6.18.2012) Pat MacLean from Black Dog Hates Skunks on being a good Dad.

Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim making the catch of the year in right center field of Oriole Park last week – Camden Yards, Baltimore, Maryland

“I hold with the Existentialist Theory of Game Sevens, which is as follows: game sevens are inherently compelling because they represent the greatest moment of radical freedom in hockey, and therefore generate the closest sports analogs to the fundamental terror of the human condition. Much of hockey is deterministic, in that it is preordained by genetics or controlled by a master strategy. Through the whole of the regular season and all the high holidays, most things in the game happen for a reason, be that reason the inherent gifts of players or the grand plans of GMs. But the moment the puck drops on a game seven, everything that has happened before ceases to matter.” (6.25.2012) Ellen Etchingham from Backhand Shelf on chaos theory and hockey in her review of Game 7 of the 2006 Stanley Cup between Edmonton and Carolina.